Ronda Rolfes
Georgetown University, DC·Microbiology & Immunology
Candida albicans is a fungus that usually lives harmlessly on the skin and in the mouth, gut and urogenital tract of healthy people. It can also cause surface infections and, especially in people with weakened immune systems, life-threatening infections that spread through the body.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Biochemistry
Biology
- Topics
Candida albicans
fungal pathogen
opportunistic infection
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Oct 2026
What they work on
- Test whether inositol pyrophosphates, energy-rich signaling molecules, control the PHO pathway that maintains phosphate balance when Candida albicans faces phosphate limitation.
- Test whether inositol pyrophosphates regulate TOR (Target of Rapamycin) signaling, which links nutrient supply to growth, in C. albicans cells experiencing phosphate limitation.
- Determine how inositol pyrophosphate control of phosphate sensing and TOR signaling affects the switch to filamentous hyphae and the virulence of C. albicans.
More about the research
More than 400,000 people get such infections worldwide each year, and 47–75% die despite antifungal treatment. To cause disease, C. albicans must switch from round yeast cells to long filaments called hyphae, which help it forage for nutrients. The lab found that when phosphate is scarce, C. albicans responds by becoming filamentous and virulent. Phosphate is a nutrient the fungus must take from its human host.
Why it matters
This work adds basic understanding of how a fungus that causes hundreds of thousands of deadly infections each year senses phosphate scarcity and turns that signal into the filament switch it needs to cause disease. Because phosphate uptake and filamentation are both essential for C. albicans virulence, knowing how inositol pyrophosphates control these steps could eventually inform efforts to understand and counter this pathogen.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Haoping Liu
University of California-Irvine, CA·Microbiology & Immunology
Investigate how Nrg1, a repressor that blocks hypha genes, is rapidly removed when Candida albicans starts forming hyphae, a step controlled by the Ras-cAMP-PKA signaling pathway.
Jessica Hargarten
Rutgers University-New Brunswick, NJ·Microbiology & Immunology·Early-career
Characterize how deficiency in MTOR, the signaling enzyme that senses nutrients and controls immune cell growth and metabolism, affects susceptibility to Cryptococcus infection using established murine models of pulmonary and central nervous system cryptococcosis.
Sohail Khoshnevis
Emory University, GA·Biochemistry
Define the composition and interacting partners of eIF3, a translation-starting protein complex, in different cell types of Candida albicans using biochemical assays and proteomics.
The school
Georgetown University: 14 labs on PI Pages, $377M a year on research, 206 research doctorates a year.
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